Reading Journal 2024: Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essays
Author: Marcie Alvis Walker
Walker writes with a careful hand of someone with experience. Someone for whom these experiences shaped a perspectives on what, as she says, it means for her to be a woman, to be black, and to be holy in this world
A world that has mired these three things in a history of racism, gender oppression, and problematic views of God.
The book follows a series of interconnected essays in a way that explores the process of growing up into this world as a child of 70s America. There are multiple layers to her story, beginning with her complex relationship with her mother, and flowing outwards into her relationship with her own children, the world and God.
All of which play into her relationship with herself. Who she is as a black woman in America, and ultimately as a child of God. A life, as she says, anchored in being born of the very same Spirit that said “Let there be light” and “declared that it was good.”
It is, above all else, a story of hope. A particular story that wants to give voice to the whole. A reminder that beauty can be found in the pain. That God can be found in the confusion. That being a woman, and being black, can be reclaimed from the childhood that at once tried to steal and conceal it while also giving her the experiences to know what this means.
The Stories of my Life 